Metro Pulse/Editor's Corner/City Council elections

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What the new City Council can do

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Joe Hultquist was standing on a countertop at Stanley's Greenhouse in South Knoxville on Tuesday night, straining against a sore throat to talk to a room full of supporters. The first part of his message was clear and to the point: "We beat the machine!"

But after the cheers and congratulations died down, Hultquist—the newly elected City Council representative from the 1st District—outlined years of hard work ahead. "The bar has been set too low," he said. "It's been set so low you could roll over it in your sleep. What this campaign has been about, and what the next four years are about, is raising the height of the bar."

That is the single greatest challenge facing the five new members of City Council, who will take office in December. Hultquist will join Steve Hall, Rob Frost, Mark Brown and (barring a recount to the contrary) Barbara Pelot on a body that has in recent years ossified, calcified and fossilized to the point of near-absurdity. With term limits staring them in the face, sitting Council members have turned into caricatures of their own worst traits, operating in an intellectual and moral vacuum informed only by Mayor Victor Ashe's persuasive arm-twisting and the occasional burst of citizen outrage.

Anyone expecting dramatic differences from the new Council will probably be disappointed, at least in the short term. This was an election, not a revolution, and none of the new Council members is a radical in any sense of the word. Several of them enjoyed behind-the-scenes support from Ashe during the campaigns, and they're unlikely to come into office looking to tangle unnecessarily with the mayor. And you can count on Ashe, who plays political power games as well as anyone in town, to do what it takes to keep himself a comfortable cushion when it comes to rounding up Council votes. (Plus, whatever Ashe has lost in reliable yes-men and -women, he's also now shut of his longtime nemesis, Councilwoman Carlene Malone.)

But there will undoubtedly be some changes. For one thing, all of the candidates running this year were in the shadow of last spring's Council vote that denied Danny Mayfield's widow, Melissa, the chance to serve out her late husband's term. That action, widely attributed to string-pulling by Ashe, led to this summer's KnoxRecall effort and inevitably spilled over into the Council races. Most of the candidates, including all five of Tuesday's winners, were at pains to promise greater openness in the operations of Council, more discussion and debate at meetings, more public workshops and more direct accountability for their votes. They need to stick to those promises (however much pressure they get from Ashe and others to go along and get along). However any of them decides to vote on a contentious issue, they need to be willing to listen attentively to all of the information and explain without condescension or contempt the reasons for their votes.

Moreover, they need to demand similar levels of accountability from the mayor and his staff. When, as so often happens, actions are proposed without being thoroughly thought out, discussed, or understood, Council members must be willing to call the mayor on it. They will encounter resistance and irritation, of course, as Malone has for years. But where Ashe could easily dismiss Malone by simply rolling his eyes at the other Council members, the new Council has no reason to go along quite so willingly. The five representatives elected on Tuesday will be in office longer than Ashe or any of the remaining Council incumbents, who will all be term-limited out in 2003. The new Council members will potentially be in office until 2009, and that should give them a vested interest in making sure that whatever happens in the next two years is done for the long-term good of the city rather than the short-sighted political ends that have driven civic policy in recent years.

The new Council members will also be in the enviable position of having their hands already on the rudder when the next mayor and four other new Council members come on board in 2003. That means that they collectively have the chance to influence the agenda of the next administration in a way that no Council has for years. They should not squander that opportunity on the traditional petty politics of ensuring jobs for family members of supporters or repaying big-money contributors with commercial rezonings. A big part of raising the bar that Hultquist talked about is elevating the city's sense of what its leaders can be and do. And part of that is politely telling assorted interests, from patronage job-holders to Chamber of Commerce notables who have gotten used to an endless stream of big-buck public contracts, that a democratically elected government is more than a gravy train.

The factors that led to the five victories on Tuesday vary from candidate to candidate. But no assessment can overlook the specific case of the 1st District, where Hultquist resoundingly defeated Greg Pinkston. The victory was sweet for many reasons. Hultquist was one of the most thoughtful, well-grounded candidates the city has seen in years, and his campaign reflected it. Even his brochures were full of intelligent commentary and insightful analysis. And he ran against one of the least qualified contenders on the scene, a school security officer with no demonstrated political abilities or civic experience.

That Pinkston and his supporters turned early and often to negative campaigning was no surprise—there was no way they could take on Hultquist in a fair fight. But the depth and volume of the vitriol they spewed was reprehensible. Fortunately, and to the credit of Knoxville's voters, it didn't work. If anything, Hultquist's sizable margin of victory proves that Pinkston's tactics turned off more people than they attracted. Greg Pinkston is no doubt finished as a viable political candidate around here. But the men who worked behind the scenes on his vicious campaign also deserve to be remembered and rebuked—his uncle, County Commissioner Howard Pinkston; city political operative Jack Barnes, who's unlikely to find many friends on the new Council; gun-for-hire Joe May, whose expensive advice was evidently no use at all to either Pinkston or the 2nd District's Joe Bailey; and County Commission hatchetman-at-large Ray Hill.

They should all be ashamed of their associations with such a miserable enterprise, as should the assorted monied interests, including prominent people at the Knoxville Area Chamber Partnership, who either actively or tacitly supported Pinkston (presumably out of the hope that he would vote for whatever big developments they and their friends proposed). From now on, the phrase "Pinkston campaign" will carry a whiff of poison. Anyone facing similar tactics in the future will be able to dismiss them by saying, "Oh, they're just running a Pinkston campaign against me," or, "Oh, you know, my opponent has hired some of the guys from the Pinkston campaign." And future political hopefuls should note that the politics of character assassination are not only morally repulsive—they do not work.

Hultquist is right. It's time to set the bar higher. Tuesday's elections are a good start.